Utility Tools that can be used for more effective and better troubleshooting

[saurabh_pathak]

It's been more than 3 months I have been working on Forums and providing support to Customer on various issues. While working on challenging issues, it becomes difficult to find the root cause. In such scenarios, third party tools can definitely help us provide the cause or at least provide relevant information to find the cause. There have been many threads where these tools turned out to be savior.

The tools I have used so far are Charles, DebugDiag, Depends, Fiddler, Modules and Process Monitor, though Charles and Fiddler do the same thing. It's up to us to choose the tool according to comfort and knowledge of its usage. Introduction to every tool is given below.

Charles
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Fiddler
Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.
Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

The http request can be traced for following issues:

• Red X for all images in Crystal Reports  
• Creating the configuration section handler for BusinessObjects/crystalReports/printControl
• Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

DebugDiag
The Debug Diagnostic Tool (DebugDiag) is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as hangs, slow performance, memory leaks or fragmentation, and crashes in any user-mode process. The tool includes additional debugging scripts focused on Internet Information Services (IIS) applications, web data access components, COM+ and related Microsoft technologies.

The following issues can be solved with this tool

• Application crash.
• Print engine not opened.
• The report could not be submitted for background processing.
• Printer driver’s related issues.

Depends
Depends GUI tool scans any Windows module (including .exe, .dll, .ocx, and .sys, among others) and builds a hierarchical tree diagram of all dependent modules. For each module found, it lists all the functions that are exported by that module, and identifies which of those functions are actually being called by other modules. Another view displays the minimum set of required files, along with detailed information about each file, including a full path to the file, base address, version numbers, computer type, debug information, and more.

It's use can help us track following

• Unknown Database Connector Error - Error in file temp_GUID.rpt
• UFL u2lbar.dll that implements this function is missing
• Installing the latest version of microsoft office application fails when printing or displaying reports via crystal reports. The system reports a "Report Failed to Load" message.

Modules
Modules is used to compare file information between a source computer and a destination computer. Often we use modules to compare versions of files between a working and non working computer.
It can be used to comapre the machine environements (for the loss of dll's).For e.g. the error “The system cannot find the file specified" can be tracedby comparing the machine environments

Process Monitor
Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make
Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

It can be used to find following:

• Export to Word format crashes IIS worker process  
• To check whether CR runtimes loaded in it's memory space or not
• The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
• Load Report Failed

Remember to always search the SAP Crystal Reports, version for Visual Studio forum and the KBase before using these tools as you may save upon the time to troubleshoot if the issue has already been documented.